Human vanity always drives us to elevate the ordinary. “He put a feather in his cap and called it macaroni. … Yankee doodle dandy.” The Oxford English Dictionary gives the appropriate definition (not pasta in this case) as “an exquisite of a class which arose in England about 1760 and consisted of young men who had traveled and affected the tastes and fashions prevalent in continental society … a fop.” In a standard Renaissance version of this universal tendency, scholars translated their common names into the ancient tongues of a classical world that had, in their firm conviction, learned everything worth knowing. Thus, Georg Bauer (literally George the farmer), became Georgius Agricola (the same, but in Latin) and published, under this prettified name, the first great geological treatise (De natura fossilium plus four shorter works) in 1546. But Philipp Schwartzerd (Mr. black earth) tried to conquer his cultivator by reinventing himself in even classier Greek—becoming Philipp Melanchthon (the same Mr. black earth in Athenian splendor), the right-hand man of Martin Luther and the Reformation.

I am not linking the Catholic naturalist who clothed himself in Latin with the Protestant reformer who dressed in Greek just to make an idle linguistic point. The two men share a direct and fascinating paleontological connection—for, in 1551, Melanchthon wrote a key letter to a Frankfurt publisher, urging him to print the geological treatise of his friend Christopher Encelius (or Entzelt, in his native German) by differentiating this effort from the prior and magnificent work of Agricola. Encelius should be published, Melanchthon wrote (as we know because his letter became the preface to Encelius's book, finally printed in 1557), non ut certet cum viro doctissimo et ingeniosissimo Georgio Agricola, sed ut suo aliquo labore studia philosophica adiuvet—“not so that he may compete with the …